Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[factory]

Oh.. well, that's... good, then?

Seriously, they take a 10% cut but can't make the servers work? 

They really need to invest in some more/better servers and fix their code.
Had this problem for a couple of months now, ePay keeps reminding me about this Racal counter even though it was bought in December and has since been repaired (also didn't cost £50). 


Oh look there it is in one of my stacks of TE. 


David

[Brumby]

..... and fix their code.

 


I do love a dreamer.

[bd139]

Fucks sake there goes my evening. Panasonic Lumix DMC-G5K is a piece of shit for a camera. My middle one got given one for her GCSEs by a well meaning relative but unfortunately the due is a DSLR enthusiast so had meddled the fuck with it first and it's classifiable as vintage now as well. So she went out this weekend and took some photos and the entire batch got show in Panasonic's proprietary RW2 format with no processing whatsoever. This lead to every bloody photo's histogram being screwed up and full of noise. Argh. So I managed to unfuck 30 of the best images with Darktable to some degree. So I reset the camera and got it shooting fine JPEG and there's still really bad noise on the images. Hmmmm 10 year old camera - steaming pile of turds. Fuck it - the camera on her 2020 iPhone SE is better.

Edit: comparing my now 11 year old D3100 would have been better  . Now I remember why I don't own a DSLR any more!!!!

What is the ISO set at?

Tried it at various and different lighting conditions. Noise is still there.

[Specmaster]

Fucks sake there goes my evening. Panasonic Lumix DMC-G5K is a piece of shit for a camera. My middle one got given one for her GCSEs by a well meaning relative but unfortunately the due is a DSLR enthusiast so had meddled the fuck with it first and it's classifiable as vintage now as well. So she went out this weekend and took some photos and the entire batch got show in Panasonic's proprietary RW2 format with no processing whatsoever. This lead to every bloody photo's histogram being screwed up and full of noise. Argh. So I managed to unfuck 30 of the best images with Darktable to some degree. So I reset the camera and got it shooting fine JPEG and there's still really bad noise on the images. Hmmmm 10 year old camera - steaming pile of turds. Fuck it - the camera on her 2020 iPhone SE is better.

Edit: comparing my now 11 year old D3100 would have been better  . Now I remember why I don't own a DSLR any more!!!!

What is the ISO set at?

Tried it at various and different lighting conditions. Noise is still there.

Have you checked that it hasn't been programmed with a custom function. You could also see if there is a firmware update for it. Also have you got another lens to try on it to make sure that it is the camera body or lens at fault?

[nfmax]

BT Openreach staff gather together and put on their festive costumes for the traditional Halloween 'trick or treat' tour of our local cable ducting

Shortly after I took that picture an eleventh van turned up. Some sort of football-themed tribute to Nobby Stiles, perhaps?

When I came back a few hours later there were cable drum dispensers near some of the manhole covers: looks like they were putting in new ducting, dare I hope for blowing in fibre in the near future? FTTP = Fibre To The Promises

Took 3 years after they did that here. Don't hold your breath.

Just along the road today, what do I see?

Talked to some of the workers. Word Has Gone Out (and presumably, taxpayer's money has changed hands) and rural areas like ours are getting FTTP rolled out pronto. The PSTN will be switched off and the copper wire taken down. The fibre network should be going live in 'a few months'.

A pity, really, as the copper wires in the picture are only 3 weeks old. A 300+ year old oak tree came down and clobbered the previous pole, which is why the green is in such a mess. The tree was almost completely hollow inside.

Well it's finally arrived - I have just ordered an upgrade to 160Mb fibre Internet, which should go in mid-March (sticking with Andrews & Arnold). It was a long story. It turns out, contrary to what BT's network plans stated, there was in fact no duct at all along much of road, just direct-buried multipair. Eventually a crew turned with a neat gadget that cuts a 6" wide slot through the tarmac and into the ground. In this they installed plastic drainpipe (sort of) which they pulled the cable into - it has 36 fibres. You can see by where the duct disappears into various junction boxes how they will be installing additional splitters to serve additional clusters of properties along the route.

I gather the reason why we got done when we did (apart from qualifying for DCMS/government funding) is that our local part-time Celeb ordered FTTP on demand for her country residence. Price rumoured to be around £30,000 to £50,000. I suppose she can afford it!

Last week I started COVID-isolation for 2 weeks before a hospital visit. The following day, Openreach turned up to install the fibre drop cables (which are actually fibre/twisted pair hybrids). Fortunately they didn't need to enter the house. So far the cable is run from the CBT on a nearby pole and attached to the house, with the end left in a coil on the ground. They did the 2 neighbours who ordered when I did on the same visit. I spoke sweetly to them (from a safe distance) and persuaded them to leave me a 30m connectorised 'inside/outside' fibre cable for me to install myself, long enough to run from the wiring closet to the external customer splice point (CSP), to minimise the time spent inside on the final installation visit. Yesterday afternoon spent making holes in ceilings, fishing cables through inaccessible crevices & conduits, and crawling through the tiny gap that leads to the part of the roof where I can access the inside of the gable wall where I want it to exit. I didn't think I was still agile enough to get in there. Or more importantly, back out again.

Still, it's done. If they start getting shirty I'll suggest if they can give me a connector cleaning kit I'll install the ONT myself, no need for anyone from Openreach to pass the threshold at all! Second visit now scheduled for 26th March. By which time my isolation will be over, and I will have had my first COVID vaccination anyway.

[vk6zgo]

damn you and your beautiful hp3400a.

now you have me looking for one to keep my hp400e company.

Yeah, I was thinking it would make a nice "bookend", along with my 410C!   

[vk6zgo]

remembered how easy it was to fix a bumper on my 1968 volkswagen beetle and decided to at least investigate.

Speaking of bumpers, we were hit by a Vespa in our V70 summer before last in southern France. I was making a left turn and the Vespa driver decided to overtake me. She hit us at perhaps 210° just by the left front wheel, and was -- short of a few bruises -- unhurt.  The force pushed the entire front, which includes the visible parts of the bumper, off the car, and put a few dents in the fender and the hood. So, there I was, on the French Riviera, in 40° heat, trying to patch the car up for a 2000+ km drive home. Your story matches mine in many things. I always carry a pretty complete tool kit, and more so for long travels. This of course includes soft iron wire, the kind used to lash up rebar. The plastic rivets that hold the upper edge of the grille of course had sheared off completely, so I rigged new tiedowns with the wire, and this repair brought us all the way home.

Once home, I bought new rivets, knocked the dents out of the fender, and used liberal amounts of cyanoacrelate to glue everything back in shape. I had to buy a few pieces of structural plastic; there's a "facelift hook" with a screw that pulls the front backwards and holds it in place on each side inside the wheel well, and it sits on a large plastic skeleton piece. They were pretty bad to start with, and the crash did them over completely, so had to fit new ones. Volvo still have them, in stock. Quite OK for a 20yo car.

You have plastic rivets? luxury!

The silly bloody Hyundai my daughter had, used clips, not unlike the ones used on the battery cover in remote controls.
You know, the ones that rely upon the resilience of plastic for their "spring clip" effect.

Unfortunately, with the "stone tray/bumper" just as with the remote controls, the plastic resilience rapidly goes to "resilience heaven" so if they become unclipped, that's your lot!

Complete new unit, at multi - hundred dollars, thank you very much!

[mnementh]

Oklay... I think maybe Linus has jumped the shark. 

mnem
*toddles off to ded*

[bitseeker]

Oh.. well, that's... good, then?

Seriously, they take a 10% cut but can't make the servers work? 

They really need to invest in some more/better servers and fix their code.
Had this problem for a couple of months now, ePay keeps reminding me about this Racal counter even though it was bought in December and has since been repaired (also didn't cost £50). 

Yeah, poor software development and QA...don't get me started.

Oh look there it is in one of my stacks of TE. 

Nice, cozy stack. That current adapter is a bit of a non-conformist, eh?

[bitseeker]

Added Dave's tweet about our "test equipment dark web" to the "TEA around the Web" section in the OP.

(I'm enjoying the thread in time-warp mode. )

[Zucca]

Car companies are following Tesla with upgrading software/firmware over the mobile network data.

I still think a vehicle is not like an iPhone.

Scary.

[Saskia]

Why did you run over that red light and that elderly woman ?

My Tesla bluescreened while  a software update was being applied and I could do nothing ...

[med6753]

Reason number 1034 why Winblows can be a PITA. Over the past few days the laptop has been refusing to go into sleep mode after my designated 3 minutes of inactivity. I can force it manually but it won't do it automatically. I checked my Power Profiles and everything was set properly. Decided to run the "Power Troubleshooter". I figured it was worth a shot even though Windows troubleshooters rarely, if ever, identify the issue. And true to form all it came back with is that I should be running a "Balanced" power plan rather than my designated high performance plan. Well thank you MS but that's what I want and you can kiss my behind. So much for that. But MS got it's revenge. It screwed with some of my power settings. I had to go back into my power plan and fix it to my liking.

But I still had the no automatic sleep issue. Over to the cmd line....powercfg/requests. It showed mousocoreworker.exe as the item preventing sleep. Search determined that's associated with Windows Update and a known cause of no sleep. The fix? Go to Windows Update and tell it to check for updates. I had none, was up to date. Then reboot. After reboot do a powercfg/request. Now clean. And sleep works. Winblows. 

[bd139]

Fucks sake there goes my evening. Panasonic Lumix DMC-G5K is a piece of shit for a camera. My middle one got given one for her GCSEs by a well meaning relative but unfortunately the due is a DSLR enthusiast so had meddled the fuck with it first and it's classifiable as vintage now as well. So she went out this weekend and took some photos and the entire batch got show in Panasonic's proprietary RW2 format with no processing whatsoever. This lead to every bloody photo's histogram being screwed up and full of noise. Argh. So I managed to unfuck 30 of the best images with Darktable to some degree. So I reset the camera and got it shooting fine JPEG and there's still really bad noise on the images. Hmmmm 10 year old camera - steaming pile of turds. Fuck it - the camera on her 2020 iPhone SE is better.

Edit: comparing my now 11 year old D3100 would have been better  . Now I remember why I don't own a DSLR any more!!!!

What is the ISO set at?

Tried it at various and different lighting conditions. Noise is still there.

Have you checked that it hasn't been programmed with a custom function. You could also see if there is a firmware update for it. Also have you got another lens to try on it to make sure that it is the camera body or lens at fault?

It’s had a full reset done on it. Only got one lens. Definitely not the lens!

[bd139]

Reason number 1034 why Winblows can be a PITA. Over the past few days the laptop has been refusing to go into sleep mode after my designated 3 minutes of inactivity. I can force it manually but it won't do it automatically. I checked my Power Profiles and everything was set properly. Decided to run the "Power Troubleshooter". I figured it was worth a shot even though Windows troubleshooters rarely, if ever, identify the issue. And true to form all it came back with is that I should be running a "Balanced" power plan rather than my designated high performance plan. Well thank you MS but that's what I want and you can kiss my behind. So much for that. But MS got it's revenge. It screwed with some of my power settings. I had to go back into my power plan and fix it to my liking.

But I still had the no automatic sleep issue. Over to the cmd line....powercfg/requests. It showed mousocoreworker.exe as the item preventing sleep. Search determined that's associated with Windows Update and a known cause of no sleep. The fix? Go to Windows Update and tell it to check for updates. I had none, was up to date. Then reboot. After reboot do a powercfg/request. Now clean. And sleep works. Winblows. 

This is the sort of random shit that does my head in with windows. I just want the thing to stay where I left it. My corp work crate is doing something utterly annoying like that as well. Every time you apply windows updates, which it forces you to do weekly due to the policy applied, it turns Device Guard on. For anyone who doesn’t know what this is, it turns on HyperV virtualisation and uses it to partition some bits of the OS off for security benefits (apparently). But at the same time it breaks all other hypervisors on the box. So in my case virtualbox. So once a week after applying updates I have to run a random power shell script from MS which turns it back off again. The company have turned it off in their policy stuff but that isn’t enough to do it. You have to run “DG_readiness3.2.ps1 -Disable” which pokes some shit in the registry and then forces you through some “are you sure” screens on reboot.

The stupid thing? Everything I do is on Linux. The laptop runs one Ubuntu VM which I connect to from my Mac via Terminal. That’s all I use it for.  I don’t even need windows because everything I do is on that VM. But talk to corp: err we are too stupid to support macs or Linux laptops because the operations guys are windows weenies. The ENTIRE FUCKING COMPANY IS LINUX behind the scenes. Argh. All windows does is get in the fucking way and cost us money.

[beanflying]

Actually found 10 minutes  to power up the new beasty. Doesn't seem to like the 16pF 6200 Tek probes from my 453 to much or there is an issue with the test oscillator (8-12pF is the range suggested) It came with a pair of evilbay trash 6100 clones

Fed some assorted signals from the Siglent on the main bench. Output 2 to Aux 2 was max stretch for the longest test cable I own. More Jenga or a new longer lead needed

Dropped a few test points from my Valhalla Calibrator via the 6200 probe and all looked as expected albeit it off in amplitude due to the probes. So looks like I am waiting for my 6139A probe for proper playing and some bench space to lift the lid and look for suspect Caps.

[bd139]

Yeah you want to shotgun all the SMD elecs in that. They make a right mess when they go and they were all peak capacitor plague.

[capt bullshot]

Actually found 10 minutes  to power up the new beasty. Doesn't seem to like the 16pF 6200 Tek probes from my 453 to much or there is an issue with the test oscillator (8-12pF is the range suggested) It came with a pair of evilbay trash 6100 clones

But wait, it's Y2K OK, so what could possibly go wrong?

[med6753]

That is one ugly square wave. 

[beanflying]

That is one ugly square wave. 

The Square wave might be ugly but at least the Fan on this is not unlike other Tek fans we could mention 

[bd139]

OMG I just got that picture out of my head as well. 

[med6753]

This Type 422 continues to impress. Deoxit all the noisy switches and pots and now both channels rock stable. Vertical gain on both channels needed just a tweak. DC balance on both needed adjustment but that's not surprising. Sweep timing is right on the mark. The only thing that seems a little wonky is the trigger. It won't Auto trigger at all. I can set the trigger control manually and it locks. And it's absolutely solid. Weird.

This scope is in very good condition internally despite the case looking like it went to war. I want to paint it but it's still too cold. I do all my painting in the garage. Weather forecast for later in the week has a warming trend but ideally it should be >60 degrees F but that won't happen.

At a later date I will be re-capping the PSU. After that a more in depth calibration and compensation. And while many don't like that "old electronics smell" for some reason I don't mind it.

     

[med6753]

OMG I just got that picture out of my head as well. 

Do you need to reminder? I aim to please. 

[tautech]

This Type 422 continues to impress. Deoxit all the noisy switches and pots and now both channels rock stable. Vertical gain on both channels needed just a tweak. DC balance on both needed adjustment but that's not surprising. Sweep timing is right on the mark. The only thing that seems a little wonky is the trigger. It won't Auto trigger at all. I can set the trigger control manually and it locks. And it's absolutely solid. Weird.

This scope is in very good condition internally despite the case looking like it went to war. I want to paint it but it's still too cold. I do all my painting in the garage. Weather forecast for later in the week has a warming trend but ideally it should be >60 degrees F but that won't happen.

At a later date I will be re-capping the PSU. After that a more in depth calibration and compensation. And while many don't like that "old electronics smell" for some reason I don't mind it.

   

Really if it's not that bad why don't you just probe the rails to check ripple is within spec and if so leave it be ?

[Brumby]

OMG I just got that picture out of my head as well. 

Do you need to reminder? I aim to please. 

Thank you for your consideration .... but, please, NO.